Читать книгу A Hunt for Optimism - Viktor Shklovsky - Страница 9

RUDIN

I

Do you remember Pisarev from “A Russian Man at a Rendezvous”?³

Remember Rudin in a gondola, stroking, I think, the hair of a Venetian girl under the stars and probably talking about the waves?

Beautiful people are always more translatable, or it is perhaps the manner in which they carry that beauty that’s translatable.

Or they simply don’t know how to wear it.

It’s either that or I’m jealous.

The person whom I’ll call Sokolov was a very handsome man.

He had a strong neck that smoothly transitioned to his shoulders. And his head was well set on his shoulders.

His back wasn’t hunched.

You could see the shape of his legs through his wide pants. It was obvious that one could walk rather impressively with such legs.

His correctly positioned feet were visible through his boots.

He was well-put-together as a whole.

His lips were not chiseled, but sculpted on the face.

His eyes — gray or blue, depending on taste — were set wide apart, and his ears weren’t too large.

He was always a little melancholy and full of life at the same time.

I had seen him a few times drinking wine. I’d always arrive later than everyone else, when the wine inside the bottle had already turned into a yellow mirror and could have been reflected on the ceiling if anyone cared.

It could have been used in cinematography as a device to surprise viewers, to show how attentive we are.

They would sit drinking for a while. The tram cars would quiet down.

Then the woman with small ears and close-cropped hair that deprived her face of convexity would say:

“The arc of the tram car whistles along the wire like an off-key flute. The chest of the street hums under the rail strings with wooden altos, or whatever they are called. Night . . .”

The night would advance. The clock on the post outside the window would frame it.

“. . . is advancing. The orchestra becomes silent. Only the drum roll remains. The sound of the late night buses . . .”

Illuminated from the back, the clock would comply, casting shadows on the dial with its hands.

“. . . buses. The iron curtain falls as in a theater. The spectators have dispersed. They have already gone home. They have nothing else to do . . .”

The mirror descends into the bottom of the bottle.

“. . . to do. And the last spectator, who evidently has nowhere else to go, who feels melancholy, to whose challenging call nobody will respond or emerge from behind the iron ribcage of the curtain, is still applauding in the empty hall. That’s the last coachman — the sound of the horseshoe clanging against the stone.”

“There was an accident,” said the man whom I was just describing. “You see, I’m going through a crisis. My bride, remember, when we were at the café, remember the blonde, who kept smiling at us when she was serving? . . . She wore a little uniform. They wash their uniforms at home. She lives on the seventh floor . . .”

“I know,” my neighbor interrupted, “I’ve been there . . .”

“Wait,” said Sokolov, “you don’t know anything. You ought to feel ashamed. She was trying to hang her robe out of the window to dry. I can only imagine. She must have misplaced her hand. Grabbed nothing but air. She slipped and fell off. I found out from the paper. I can’t even go into that neighborhood.”

Well then.

The hands of the clock made their circular journey. We turned silent. I went to see him off.

As you may know, it was spring. My head stopped spinning in the street, my legs were lighter without the galoshes. There was a tent at the crossroad with a blinding light in it. And two moving shadows of welders on the wall.

Occasionally a carriage would go by and you could see the pavement through the wheels. People on the carriages turned pale from the light of the dawn.

We were walking around the Sadovy Circle. The day was breaking. The leaves on the trees were opening up. We walked without talking. Then Sokolov said:

“She was my fourth. They . . .”

I really didn’t want to hear about it. I started to hum something and he stopped talking.

The empty streets stretched to the side and upwards from the Sadovy Circle. We were going far, like tram cars, and it kept getting lighter.

“Another girl,” Sokolov went on, “was supposed to visit me when I was working abroad. My best friend was traveling with her. I was expecting them. She was laughing strangely when they arrived. And my friend said: ‘The road — you see . . . It’s so charming . . . Forgive me.’ Why did he tell me that? I couldn’t forgive him . . . And my third . . .”

The sky was getting lighter. Then it was completely light. A stray tram car with a wrong letter and wrong number stood on the Kudrinskaya Square. It was not supposed to be there — it was picking up a group of conductors to take them to work.

The loader came and threw a newspaper to the police officers.

We separated.

II

One of my friends is a lighthearted, portly, ruddy-cheeked doctor. When we meet, he likes to entertain me with conversations about Buryatia and venereal diseases. He traveled to an island on Lake Baykal to provide medical care to the islanders. When he went back there a few years later, or maybe after a year, he found a small shrine on the island. There were a syringe and an empty vial on the shrine. People made sacrifices there.

And even monetary offerings, as he claimed.

Lake Baykal is wide; the people can be cured and their cities can be modernized.

Once he told me the following:

“I have a patient — he’s a strong, healthy man. I did some tests to check his general health. And do you know what he does?”

I was thinking about Lake Baykal. The water is exceptionally clear and you can see the stones forty meters below the surface.

“Just imagine — the man reads chronicles of tragic occurrences and chooses tragedies with women, convincing himself that he loves them.

“He’s searching for rejection, tragedy, impossibility. He quarrels with his friends, because they take his women away.

“Yet he’s very handsome. You should see his neck and chest! Reminds me of a younger Bakunin. And he has psychological impotence . . .”

“It’s Romanticism,” I told him, “I know your patient’s name. He’s afflicted with Romanticism. They made sacrifices to the disease. His name is — ”

But he stopped me, saying that it was a medical secret.

3. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s essay “Russky chelovek na rendezvous” (1858), which critically analyzes the hero’s indecisiveness in romantic affairs in Ivan Turgenev’s Asya and other works.